Mask
by My blue rose
Summary: Molly Hooper isn't who you think she is. She's a former intelligence agent hiding behind a mask. But when a certain consulting detective decides to move in with her after faking his own death, she finds it impossible to hide who she really is. Especially when enemies have a vested interest in making sure her new flat mate stays dead. Sherlock/Molly


**A/N: SIS is short for ****Secret Intelligence Service****, commonly known as ****MI6 ****(****Military Intelligence, Section 6****). It is the agency which supplies ****Her Majesty's Government ****with ****foreign intelligence****. For my fellow American reader's think CIA (or just James Bond).**

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**Prologue**

She isn't who everyone thinks she is.

Molly Hooper is a pathologist, insecure, stutters around men she likes. Molly is a bit shallow but loyal, not clever but smart enough. She is not Molly. Nor is she any of the assumed names and personalities she has created over the past ten years. But she likes her Molly persona well enough. It's better than that time in Amsterdam when she was Marijn, the witty prostitute. Or the time when she was the Russian gun runner Milena. She'd picked Molly's personality because it was easy. Easy to act and easy to predict what a Molly type would do.

It was also tedious and boring.

It was lucky that she spent most of her time around dead people. Otherwise there would be no way she could keep up the Molly act. Of course, she hadn't expected to have to be Molly for this long or else she'd have chosen a more interesting personality for her. The problem with masks is that they always show an element of who you are. The more the personality you affect is different from yours the more likely you are to slip up and revert to your true self. And that meant death.

Or it used to.

She was, technically, on probation from SIS. It sounded better than 'forced retirement' even if it amounted to the same thing in the end. She'd never be allowed back and that was what hurt the most. She'd been the best. Her IQ was off the charts. She knew twelve ways to kill someone with her bare hands. She spoke two dozen languages. There wasn't a computer she couldn't hack. She could act better than most film stars. She'd saved lives. She'd been the best and she had 127 kills to prove it.

She also had an eidetic memory that allowed her to remember every one of their faces.

Nervous breakdown. That what they'd called it. It didn't sound so bad, when put like that. Those two words didn't seem to entail what had happened. The auditory then visual, hallucinations. The night terrors. The antipsychotics that made you sleep sixteen hours a day. Being committed. Finally being released and being told that the job you'd been doing since you were eighteen couldn't employ you anymore. She'd spent nights with a gun in her hand, Hamlet's speech running though her mind.

_To be or not be, that is the question? Is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…_

She had been offered a new life. A civilian one. Any job she wanted. She'd chosen to become a medical examiner. Partly because she'd always liked medicine and had plenty of experience with the various ends a person could succumbto. And partly because she'd hoped they wouldn't be able to give her a medical license. She was wrong. Oh, they'd made her take some tests and practical examinations, made sure she knew all the procedures and how to do things properly.

She'd got the license and a job. A London flat with a large sum in the bank. And she'd been allowed to make up her back story. She'd known from the beginning that she couldn't be Molly Hooper for long. It was her way of letting herself know that she wouldn't do this forever. At first it was fun. She could pretend this was just another assignment. She was just undercover again. It made being Molly easier.

She got a cat named Toby. Decorated her flat in pink. Wrote a blog. Dated guys that she knew wouldn't work. Made bad jokes. Worked night shift. Was socially awkward—not too extreme mind you, but just enough that everyone thought her geeky and strange. She'd managed for a year. Then she'd been back with a gun in her hands and Hamlet in her head. It had all changed one night.

When she'd meet Sherlock.


End file.
